Choose Your Own Adventure: I'm a Goth Chick, Get Me Out of
Red State USA!

As your Algebra teacher Mr. Duhammel rambles on
about cofactors or some shit, your mind wanders, becomes occupied with more
important things - like which band belongs atop your best bands of all time
list – Marilyn Manson or Bauhaus. You try to put it in perspective by
asking yourself which you’d go see if both were in town on the same night
when you remember where you live and realize that neither band would ever
come within five hundred miles of such a crap heap town in the middle of Red
State USA. Suddenly for the fourth time today your world goes dark, as
if you’re soul was tumbling down a
crumbling precipice into a cold, black, infinite void barren of love from
which nothing escapes.

“Totally lame,” you think.

You feel the life being sucked from you - is this
the end? No. You soon awake with a soft shudder; your eyes open
slowly, languidly. They find the clock on the wall measuring the
passage of time, its revolving second hand cruelly mocking you as it
demonstrates the fleeting nature and meaninglessness of life. You
stare at this instrument of slavery until the final tick that brings the
sound of the class bell tocks off its crooked face.

The school day is over. This fact, as usual, makes
the rest of the sheep in your school happy, but not you. After all, what’s
the use? What’s to do now?